[schooltool-dev] Re: General Enthusiasm and Questions for SchoolTool 2007 Release

[Tom Hoffman]

On 5/7/07, David Welsh <rdavidw at gmail.com> wrote:
> Jason tells me that the SchoolTool developers, under Tom Hoffman's
> leadership, are getting together a release for end of July/early August.
> This is great news, and it could dovetail well with CanDo's release for late
> August, 2007.
>
> A couple of questions:
>
> 1) Are we going with the pull-down menus (I hope so).

I would be in favor of moving this into the trunk, but one question
would be if CanDo's skin could over-ride this if SchoolTool hadn't
adopted them in trunk but CanDo was installed.

> 2) Does SchoolTool officially support IE7 (I also hope so).

We should try to.

> 3) Is CanDo becoming an integrated part of the regular SchoolTool package,
> or will it remain its own special package???

We're definitely not going to have CanDo using its own fork of
SchoolTool, as we've had in the past.

It seems most likely that we'll have CanDo as a SchoolTool "plugin"
and a separate package, although it is still unclear exactly how that
will work.  These questions are still in flux, and we spent a lot of
time today discussing how they might play out.

Basically, as I understand it, we could spend a lot of time over the
next few months trying to really get a clean system for separating out
various parts of SchoolTool as plugins on a minimal base system, but
then we're unlikely to actually get the user functionality we're
shooting for done on time.  On the other hand, it would be nice to do
that first since if we move parts out of core in the future the
application will be somewhat more painful to upgrade.

I would be comfortable moving more of CanDo into the core, but ignas
and jinty better understand the technical issues.

Here are my priorities for the release:

* getting Ubuntu packaging working properly (this is a big job, unfortunately);
* having a stable base for CanDo;
* having essentially a preview/beta for the gutsy+1 version of SchoolTool.

This will be coming out in October -- too late for deployment in
Northern hemisphere schools, and while this should get a fair amount
of attention, we won't be promoting this as if it is ready for
mission-critical production use tracking attendance and grades.

> 4) Will the improvements to Resource Management from the PyCon Sprint be
> included???

My understanding is that these are in the trunk now.

> 5) How are the divergent grading modules being handled???

The primary factor will be what is ready and works well.  If we've got
three working versions and just have to pick the best/easiest to put
in this release, that's a problem I'd like to have.

> Anyway, the news of a release is great.  Whatever it is, it can only help
> CanDo.

--Tom